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first blush

Sunday, June 4, 2017

6.4.17

I've been batching it for a couple days, my wife is visiting friends up north. Had a couple unexpected sales, which really saved my ass, thank you, thank you. It was an unusual month in a way, two sales to two different individuals with stage four cancer, can't get into it too much publicly but will say that these transactions were both imbued with a lot of emotion and very special for me. I feel honored and grateful and once again, thanks.

Didn't know how I would pull through but I did. Someone had held a couple big checks for a month that I thought had been put in and I was definitely behind the eightball. Now I get to play another day.

Spent my time this weekend puttering around the house, filling little bare spots of canvas in the garden with color, mostly shades of blue and purple. Found my heirloom mulberry nigra at Exotica.

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Started watching the new Grateful Dead movie Long strange trip on Amazon Prime. I wanted to hate it but couldn't. I spent a lot of formative years in that particular circus. The stories and anecdotes have just been done to death over the years and there isn't much fresh gristle to masticate, but what I've seen so far, in the first episode anyway, has been good.

Out of all the authors that have written on the subject, Gans, Troy, Jackson, Relix, blah, blah, blah, the only one I felt that really captured the inner dynamic of the experience adequately, for me anyway, was Hank Harrison and he was excommunicated for spilling too much.

There is new footage here, great acid test video as well as Kesey stuff, if you have an interest in what made this psychedelic ecosystem tick, do check it out.

Cecilia Wessels

Loved the picture of the guy mowing his lawn in Alberta while the tornado rages.

Reminds me of the late Philip Jones Griffiths shot from Northern Ireland.

Philip Jones Griffiths

I suppose I should do some current events. Starting to hear from people in the resistance. I am bemused by our current state of Trumpdom but not overly freaked or inclined to change my normal routine or method of protest.

Tracy is at the Issa office every Tuesday, Jerri went to Washington D.C. for a protest. I think it's great but lack any personal ambition for a heightened role in the struggle.

But it is starting to feel like occupied France. Kip sent this podcastover, these guys take current events really seriously, if you have a spare hour give it a listen.

Timothy Snyder gives a sober and frightening comparison of today's events to Germany in 1933. I sort of wanted to puke when it was over.

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News today that Texas now has the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world. Remember when they said that they could cut funding to Planned Parenthood and other agencies would pick up the slack in terms of women's health? They lied.

Back in 2011, the first order of business for the rabidly anti-choice Texas state legislature was to shut out Planned Parenthood from the state’s Medicaid program. What they found out was that it’s not so easy to do that without hurting family planning clinics in general because you first have to scrap the entire family planning program and then re-make it to exclude Planned Parenthood from the list of eligible providers. By the time they finished this process, they had also gone ahead and cut the state’s general family planning budget by two-thirds (from $111 million to $37.9 million).The result: More than 80 family planning clinics closed, most of which were in rural areas where there were no other clinics offering affordable care. Only a third of them were run by Planned Parenthood.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott

Speaking of Texas, doesn't the governor have the most tortured smile? I often wince when I see his picture. I know he is in a wheelchair and has a disability. Very sad. Still he looks like William Kristol after a night out serial killing to me.

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The scientists at that fake science school MIT, say that Trump and Pruitt misrepresented their study on the implications of climate change. Pruitt says they fudged the results after he schooled them. Here is a link to some of the fact checking on recent Trumpisms, courtesy of that fake science magazine, Scientific American.

PRUITT: "What short memories these folks have. What short memories they have. James Hansen, former NASA scientist, the father of climate change, he’s been called, called Paris a fake and a fraud, because of the very things the president cited. Two-tenths of one — there are other studies. The Global Policy publication came out criticizing — "WALLACE: "Are you going to speak to what the MIT authors — "(CROSSTALK)PRUITT: "Look, it’s very fishy to me that MIT updated their study or their results after we started citing it. No one is questioning their methodology. Nobody’s questioning their findings."

You know I think that I will have to go with MIT on this one.

Climate change called and said that it doesn't believe in Donald Trump.

Finally, and I am frankly sick of the subject, our president is the kind of guy who leads with his elbows. People don't like being bullied by people with sharp elbows. The people in Paris aren't going to renegotiate, the people in Fiji who might be underwater one day due to rising seas and climate change aren't going to beg him back to the table. The Democrats aren't going to come crawling to him with their hats in their hands. The farmers he lied to about subsidies will not forgive him, nor will the seniors who see Medicaid and health care ravished. What people will do is wait for the first opportunity they can find for payback. Domestically and internationally, it is coming. Nobody likes a bully and they doubly can't stand a lying bully.

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The Blue Heron Blast is the work product of one Robert Sommers. He can be contacted at azurebirds at gmail.com.

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